Science & Truth
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This post, introducing “SCIENCE AND TRUTH: On Not Severing Our HUMBILICAL Chord” introduces and links to an article that is available only as a pdf download.
Here are some excerpts:
We all need to remain connected to our humbilical chords (our heuristic umbilicus harmonious*, if you will). My invented terms describe the sense that – other than our deep ultimate moral compass – we just might be wrong, arrogant, unwilling to listen, and therefore at risk of becoming self-disabled beings, crippled in our capacity to venture outside our separate thought-bubbles. Arch materialism, the notion that matter and energy constitute all that there is, represents just such a bubble.
The 20th and 21st centuries have elevated the role of science-as-myth, a progression from Robert Oppenheimer’s “destroyer of worlds” (the atomic bomb as the incarnated Hindu deity, Shiva) to science, the Maker of Worlds and Arbiter of Meaning, (where science itself replaces deity). For too many in the postmodern culture, science has become deeply entangled with the ideology of amoral atheism. As if empirical science has ever been capable of proving or disproving such deep truths of existence. Those who see the human condition being formed and deformed under the stresses of rampant “modernity” and “post-modernity” have coined the term scientism to describe the misappropriation of science as ultimate truth-guide. Scientism poses science as a moral compass, elevates science as the ultimate policy maker, and conflates the white coat of the laboratory with the garments of the priest, seer, maven or rabbi.
The overall evidence for the existence of a divine, intelligent creator is of the same general character as the evidence relied on to assert human climate forcing as the principal cause for the recent 80 year warming period. But the case for G-d as existential and essential Reality, whether and however named, is actually stronger.
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Was the advent of living conscious intelligence in the universe an absurd accident (“How did I get in this mess anyway!”) or was it an arrival fraught with transcendent significance (“How dare you put me here!”). Note how the question tends to arise more in disappointment, rather than in gratitude.
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When we see a flowering or complex biological development in the world, we are trained by experience to look for a seed.
A seed is a developmental information storage device. Seeds are much smaller than the structures and systems whose designs they contain.
When we are able to examine the development of the universe as a whole, one in which the very structures of space-time, matter and energy, seemed to emerge as if from a seed, we need to ask: Where was the seed?
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The ubiquity of human reports of encounters with the numinous, and of cultures linking creation with a morally authoritative creator can be dismissed as wishful thinking or they can be seen a persistently accumulating data set about the capacity of the human mind to discover latent, embedded meaning in the world.
Consider the parable of the mysterious, dark forest.
A desert community is ruled by shamans. Over the years, when many separate reports about a mysterious uncharted region are compared, certain common emerge – a dark forest, descriptions of trees, a river and of forest creatures.
But the desert shamans reject these accounts out of hand because “everybody knows” the whole world is a desert. Yet it is a reasonable inference that a new reality is being described, however “out of paradigm” it seems to those who “haven’t been there”. The shamans of meaningless are living in a self-created semantic desert.
For those who stubbornly reject the notion that the G-d reports to which I refer are “merely anecdotal”, I recommend a study of the remarkable threads of continuity that attend the “field reports” about the transcendent and numinous.
More...
↓Download from this link: http://jaygaskill.com/ScienceTruthAndHumility.pdf
[8 pages with graphics]
*The footnote:
My invented terms are whimsy, of course, but whimsy with a purpose. Humor is etymologically rooted in fluid and flow; humble is rooted in humus or soil, and both are mutually entangled in the human psyche. I’m using humble as in modest and unpretentious; heuristic, as the term is used describing algorithmic systems capable of learning from trial and error; umbilicus as in the navel of the developing consciousness, the source of primal nourishment; and harmonious (chord) to describe the fitting correspondence of constituent elements, where melody is a powerful metaphor about detection of the truth-context. The pursuit of elegance in mathematics and scientific theory are driven by the faith that harmony and beautiful simplicity are pointers to truth. My perspective is that all knowledge (including esthetic and ethical) is discovery; that truth is always a revealed reality-correspondence; and that intellectual arrogance makes self-disabling epistemological bubbles. We are bound together and to truth more by chords than cords.
Jay
